A New Measurement of Cosmic Ray Protons at Energies above 20 Gev/n Rich-II Ring Imaging Cerenkov)

Details A New Measurement of Cosmic Ray Protons at Energies above 20 Gev/n Rich-II Ring Imaging Cerenkov) A New Measurement of Cosmic Ray Protons at Energies above 20 Gev/n Rich-II Ring Imaging Cerenkov)

Nov 1998

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998phdt.........2e&link_type=abstract

Thesis (PHD). THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO , Source DAI-B 59/05, p. 2246, Nov 1998, 141 pages.

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A detailed description of a new balloon-borne cosmic ray instrument and the results from its flight are presented in this thesis. The instrument, named RICH-II, is the second in the series of ring-imaging Cerenkov counters developed at the University of Chicago for use in cosmic ray studies. In 1991, the first instrument (RICH-I) successfully measured the energy spectra of the light and medium cosmic rays. For RICH-II, a number of significant improvements have been implemented to the original instrument to improve its sensitivity to the lightest nuclei. The observational goal of RICH-II is a measurement of the energy spectra of the cosmic ray protons and helium nuclei in the energy range between 20 and 200 GeV per nucleon. Over this energy range these spectra have yet to be measured with an accuracy that is sufficient to test subtle predictions on the acceleration mechanism of these particles. In particular, detailed Monte Carlo simulations indicate small but significant differences between the proton and helium spectral indexes as a result of the shock acceleration process due to the different mass to charge ratios of these nuclei. The mission for the RICH-II instrument is to use the ring imaging technique to measure the spectral indices of these two nuclei with a degree of accuracy never before achieved in this energy range. The organization of this dissertation is as follows. The first chapter discusses the motivation of this work by providing an overview of theories of cosmic ray acceleration. Next, Chapter 2 contains an overview of the experiment and a description of the ring imaging Cerenkov technique for measuring particle energies. The following two chapters then go into significant detail about the design and performance of the individual detector systems: scintillators, hodoscope, and RICH counter. Chapter 5 briefly describes the 1996 balloon flight and the details associated with flying a balloon-borne payload. Finally, the method of data analysis, final results, and conclusions from this work are presented in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, respectively.

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